linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH v3 08/13] ext4: fast-commit commit range tracking

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Date:   Tue, 29 Oct 2019 22:12:59 -0700
From:   harshad shirwadkar <harshadshirwadkar@...il.com>
To:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
Cc:     Ext4 Developers List <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 08/13] ext4: fast-commit commit range tracking

Thanks for this, I'll remove these calls and add calls in ext4_map_blocks.

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 2:36 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@....edu> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 01, 2019 at 12:40:57AM -0700, Harshad Shirwadkar wrote:
> > With this patch, we track logical range of file offsets that need to
> > be committed using fast commit. This allows us to find file extents
> > that need to be committed during the commit time.
>
> We don't actually need to track when data is modified in the page
> cache, which is what this commit is actually doing.  We only need to
> track newly allocated blocks, at granularity of the logical block
> number.
>
> That's because we only need to force out newly allocated blocks to
> make sure we don't reveal stale data when we are in data=ordered mode.
> And it also follows that we don't need to track logical block ranges
> and submit inode data in data=writeback or data=journalled mode.
>
> In the case where the user has actually called fsync() on the the
> inode, we do a data integrity writeback in ext4_sync_file, and that's
> independent on the fast commit code.
>
> But if the file is being modified using buffered writes, or if an
> already allocated block is changed, and the file has *not* been
> changed, we don't need to write out those blocks on a fast commit.
> For example, in the case where we are the fast commit is being
> initiated via ext4_nfs_commit_metadata() -> ext4_write_inode(), we
> only care about submitting data for the newly allocated blocks.  And
> that's what we want to track here.
>
> Hence, all of the callers of ext4_fc_update_commit_range() here are in
> the wrong place.  (Also, they are calling ext4_fc_update_commit_range
> with byte offsets, when the function is expecting logical block
Thanks for pointing that out. My code as of now works with logical
file offsets instead of logical block offsets. So I should have used
file offset type instead of logical block type for arguments of
ext4_fc_update_commit_range. But it makes sense to just use logical
block offsets everywhere. I'll fix this in next version.

> numbers, but that really matter, since the existing call sites need to
> be all removed and replaced with new ones in ext4_map_blocks().
>
>                                      - Ted